The Church of Fear: Inside The Weird World of Scientology

by Sweeney, John

  The Church of Scientology denies that it is a cult; it denies abuse; it denies spying; it denies betraying the secrets of the confessional; it denies brainwashing.

  It was founded by the late Lafayette Ron Hubbard, known as ‘Mr Hubbard’ or LRH or L Ron, in 1954. There are people I know who still believe in Scientology, who still revere Mr Hubbard but no longer trust the Church as an institution, and they are good people and have a right to believe in whatever they want to believe in, and, uncomfortable as it is for me, I defend that right. But that right is not telescopic.

  Scientologists inside and outside the Church hold that Mr Hubbard is the saviour of humanity. Others question that. Paul Thomas Anderson’s brave and good film, The Master, is loosely based on Hubbard. The film’s tortured main character, a true disciple, is warned: ‘You know he’s making it up as he goes along.’

  The Master shows a fictional character like Mr Hubbard as a man of immense charismatic power. That portrayal helped me understand something: that, in the beginning, there was big magic that sucked people in. To others, L Ron was a ginger-haired pulp fiction writer who knocked off a story about a space alien Satan and re-baptized it as a religion. He launched his theory of Dianetics in ‘Astounding Science Fiction’ magazine in 1950. The name of the magazine is a clue.

  Dianetics soon became a philosophy and a therapy programme, and that quickly morphed into Scientology, which shape-shifted into a ‘Church’. The movement appealed to something missing from people’s lives in 1950s America. But grave anxieties started to be raised. For example, the effect of Scientology’s mind exercises was to create a trance-like state, suitable for hypnosis. Could that be lead to a kind of brainwashing?

  Scientologists were in thrall to L Ron’s ‘tech’ which enabled Scientologists to improve their communication skills. L Ron developed or borrowed a kind of 1950s ‘lie/truth detector’ technology he dubbed ‘auditing’ in which adherents would confess to an auditor, but with the added dimension of an ‘Electro-psychometer’ or ‘E-meter’ to test that they were telling the truth. The E-meter is a machine with leads running to two ‘tin cans’ which you grip with your hands. The sweat from your hands increases when you are anxious, and that anxiety shows up on a needle-and-dial dashboard which the auditor studies. Having a steady or gently floating needle is cool. If your needle jerks, then you’ve got issues and you may be lying - an ‘overt’ - or withholding the truth - a ‘withhold’. Confessions are recorded. In the early days the auditor took detailed notes; in the twenty-first century by state of the art pin-hole cameras. But could the recorded secrets of that confession, once given, be used against you – a kind of blackmail? No, says the Church. Yes, say ex-Scientologists.

  What kind of man was Mr Hubbard? Charismatic, certainly. According to the Church he created, L Ron had an amazing life story: he’d been an acclaimed explorer, a nuclear physicist, a war hero and he’d been to deep space: ‘I was in the Van Allen Belt. This is factual. You’d be surprised how warm space is.’

  ‘It is all lies. None of that is true,’ Russell Miller, his very unauthorised biographer, told me. ‘The whole religion is based on the word of a congenital liar and a brilliant confidence trickster.’ In his biography, Miller reports an ex-Scientologist, Gerry Armstrong, painting an unflattering picture of L Ron: ‘a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron Munchausen. In short, he was a con man.’

  Hubbard was a friend of Aleister Crowley, the Occultist and Silly Twit who the papers called ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’. Hubbard said of Crowley: ‘my very good friend… signs himself “the Beast”, mark of the Beast 666…’

  Some point to the distinctive sign of the Church – the cross and the star – and note its similarity to Crowley’s Tarot card design, with a cross in the foreground and a star shape behind.

  In the early 1950s sceptical reporters in America started writing negative stories. They called it the Church of the Rondroids. Hubbard hit back, calling the ordinary, non-Scientologist world, inhabited by people like you and me, ‘wog’, defining the word as ‘common, everyday garden-variety humanoid … He “is” a body, doesn’t know he’s there, etc. He isn’t there as a spirit at all. He is not operating as a Thetan.’

  By the late 1950s Mr Hubbard was suffering a blow-back as ex-members were admitted to mental hospitals. Psychiatrists, on behalf of patients who were disaffected Scientologists, started investigating, then castigating Scientology. Scientology investigated, then castigated, psychiatry. Others condemned Hubbard as an unusually inventive confidence trickster. Worse, the law enforcement authorities in America were beginning to give L Ron a rather beady eye. So he decided to up sticks and move to England. Mr Hubbard, by now a multi-millionaire, snapped up Saint Hill in 1959. The estate once belonged to the Maharajah of Jaipur, an aristocrat whose princely statelet back in India was gobbled up by democracy and whose princely fortune was left untended while he enjoyed his chukkas on the polo field. The Maharajah died, as he had lived, falling off a polo horse.

  Hubbard once boasted that he ‘sort of won’ Saint Hill in a poker game. By the time he was interested in Saint Hill, the Maharajah was dead and it seems unlikely that his estate’s solicitors would have used it as a stake in poker.

  In 1959 L Ron moved in, announcing to a reporter from the East Grinstead Courier that he was an expert on plant life. ‘The production of plant mutations,’ the Courier gushed, ‘is one of his most important projects at the moment. By battering seeds with X-rays, Dr Hubbard can either reduce a plant through its stages of evolution or advance it.’ A black and white photograph was taken of L Ron attaching electrodes to a tomato – the vegetable (botanically a fruit) that I replicated in the Industry of Death exhibition. This is one of my favourite photographs in the whole wide world.

  The Church grew from a tiny base to number tens of thousands of adepts, but some of those people left and what they had to say was not good. It suffered international notoriety. In Australia, Mr Justice Anderson concluded in 1965: ‘Scientology is evil; its techniques are evil; its practice is a serious threat to the community, medically, morally, and socially; and its adherents are sadly deluded and often mentally ill… [Scientology is] the world’s largest organization of unqualified persons engaged in the practice of dangerous techniques which masquerade as mental therapy.’ Anderson’s report is the first to touch on the theme of the Church subjecting its adherents to ‘mental enslavement’, but not the last.

  In the late sixties, the British health minister, Kenneth Robinson – a former Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy – blocked foreign Scientologists from coming to Britain: ‘The government is satisfied that Scientology is socially harmful. It alienates members of families from each other and attributes squalid and disgraceful motives to all who oppose it; its authoritarian principles and practice are a potential menace to the personality and well being of those so deluded as to become followers; above all, its methods can be a serious danger to the health of those who submit to them… There is no power under existing law to prohibit the practice of Scientology; but the government has concluded that it is so objectionable that it would be right to take all steps within its power to curb its growth.’

  The Church did not turn the other cheek. In 1967 it took on the local community around Saint Hill, suing East Grinstead Urban District Council, a teacher at a local convent school, the Chairman of the Urban District Council’s Health and Housing Committee, a farmer whose land adjoined Saint Hill Manor, and who had spoken disapprovingly of his neighbours, and thirty-eight people who had written critical things about Scientology in the papers. Most of the law suits were subsequently dropped but the Church sued the local Tory MP, Geoffrey Johnson-Smith. The libel trial lasted six weeks in 1970. The Church lost.

  To counter-attack, Hubbard created a policy called ‘Fair Game’ where enemies of the Church could be ‘injured, tricked, sued, lied to or destroyed’. Russell Miller says he faced a terrifying campaign of harassment by the Church for his heretical bi
ography.

  What did Miller think of the Church’s claim that it is a religion? ‘It exhibits all the symptoms of a classic cult. It draws people in when they are vulnerable; it causes them to disconnect from their friends and family; it makes them believe that the truth is within the cult and the world is a dangerous place.’

  L Ron’s Church suffered scandal after scandal in the sixties and seventies. On the run from the authorities, it went, like the owl and the pussycat, to sea. Miller tells the story hilariously in his book on Hubbard. After one stormy crossing too many the Church and its Founder ended up back in the United States. Perhaps the darkest days for the Church were in 1977 when the FBI discovered that the Church had been running two operations, one to frame the journalist Paulette Cooper by sending bomb threats to itself as if from her and the other to penetrate the US Government. The FBI arrested Mr Hubbard’s wife, Mary Sue and other senior Scientologists, and LRH himself went on the run, vanishing off the face of the earth.

  In 1984 the Church was accused of blackmailing its adherents to stay in, lest their intimate secrets be leaked out. Blackmail is a heavy word. But it was used by Judge Breckenridge sitting in the Los Angeles Superior Court, in his ruling against the Church and in favour of a group of ex-Scientologists, led by Gerry Armstrong, the chap who’d previously compared Mr Hubbard to Chaplin and Hitler. The Church had asked Armstrong, a dedicated Scientologist, to prepare documents for a planned biography of the Founder. Armstrong duly dug around the attic at Gilman Hot Springs, an old gamblers’ den on the edge of the Californian desert, handpicked by the Church as its secret base, now known as Gold or Int. In the attic Armstrong found a treasure trove of paperwork on Mr Hubbard but they proved to Armstrong’s satisfaction that Hubbard was a liar and a fantasist. He ran for it, taking the documents with him. The Church sued Armstrong and his fellows, and lost.

  Judge Breckenridge wrote in his judgment: ‘The picture painted by these former dedicated Scientologists, all of whom were intimately involved with LRH, or Mary Jane Hubbard, or of the Scientology Organization, is on the one hand pathetic, and on the other, outrageous. Each of these persons literally gave years of his or her respective life in support of a man, LRH, and his ideas. Each has manifested a waste and loss or frustration which is incapable of description.’

  Judge Breckenridge found: ‘Each [ex-Scientologist] has broken with the movement for a variety of reasons, but at the same time, each is still bound by the knowledge that the Church has in its possession his or her most inner thoughts and confessions, all recorded in “Pre-Clear (P.C.) folders” or other security files of the organization, and that the Church or its minions is fully capable of intimidation or other physical or psychological abuse if it suits their ends. The record is replete with evidence of such abuse.’

  Judge Breckenridge continued: ‘The practice of culling supposedly confidential “P.C. folders or files” to obtain information for purposes of intimidation and or harassment is repugnant and outrageous.’

  The judge cited a 1970 French police investigation into the Church, which concluded that ‘under the pretext of “freeing humans” (it) is nothing in reality but a vast enterprise to extract the maximum amount of money from its adepts by pseudo-scientific theories… pushed to extremes (a machine to detect lies, its own particular phraseology) to estrange adepts from their families and to exercise a kind of blackmail against persons who do not wish to continue.’

  Nothing much had changed, said Judge Breckenridge: ‘From the evidence presented to this court in 1984, at the very least, similar conclusions can be drawn. In addition to violating and abusing its own members civil rights, the organization over the years with its “Fair Game” doctrine has harassed and abused those persons not in the Church whom it perceives as enemies. The organization clearly is schizophrenic and paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to be a reflection of its founder LRH. The evidence portrays a man who has been virtually a pathological liar when it comes to his history, background, and achievements. The writings and documents in evidence additionally reflect his egoism, greed, avarice, lust for power, and vindictiveness and aggressiveness against persons perceived by him to be disloyal or hostile. At the same time it appears that he is charismatic and highly capable of motivating, organizing, controlling, manipulating, and inspiring his adherents. He has been referred to during the trial as a “genius,” a “revered person,” a man who was “viewed by his followers in awe.” Obviously, he is and has been a very complex person, and that complexity is further reflected in his alter ego, the Church of Scientology.’

  Hubbard died in 1986, a weird recluse. His autopsy said he was full of VISTARIL® or hydroxyzine hydrochloride, prescribed for disturbed or hysterical patients, and, of course, the very kind of psychiatric drugs the Church condemns.

  But that was all a very long time ago. In the 21st century the Church is engaged in a pretty much successful global march to win respect and the right to call itself a religion. The church boasts of having 11 million square feet of property around the world, a somewhat idiosyncratic index of holiness.

  In October 2006 the Church was set to open its spanking new £25 million centre in the City of London. Our Great British Weather, sadly, rained on their parade. Drizzle, drizzle, relentless drizzle. I came along to do a spot of filming from the street. As soon as we started, an official of the Church, Janet Laveau, asked us to stop filming. I told her we worked for BBC Panorama and the law allowed us to film in a London street. She said that they had blocked the street, it was a private function and she had a problem with Panorama. Janet was referring to the BBC Panorama documentary, ‘The Road to Total Freedom?’ filmed in 1987, 23 years before I joined the BBC. I repeated that that the BBC is allowed to film in London streets. We could not film inside the Church (or Org, in SciSpeak) but we could film on the street. I pointed out to her that had I been a car, she would have had a point because cars were not allowed on the road today. But I was not a car.

  We filmed a top City of London copper, Chief Superintendant Kevin Hurley, splendidly reassuring in his uniform, walk up to the podium. The police chief praised the Church as a ‘force for good’ in London, ‘raising the spiritual wealth of society’.

  It was time for the pope of Scientology to wow the faithful. David Miscavige bounded onto the stage to the rapture of the crowd, not perhaps as big as the organizers had planned. The Church of Scientology claims to have more than 10 million devotees worldwide, with 123,000 in the UK but the crowd did not look much bigger than a thousand people, if that. Quite a few seemed to be European, not British, as if they had been shipped in to bulk the numbers. But they all loved Miscavige. In the flesh, he has the manner of a high-end estate agent, smooth, polished, markedly short. The drizzle never stopped. The umbrellas twirled prettily.

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Miscavige. ‘It’s a pleasure to join you on a day that genuinely qualifies as momentous…’

  Miscavige is an Angel to some, a devil to others. A former Catholic high school drop-out, born in Philadelphia and raised in a suburb of that great city just across the state line in New Jersey, Miscavige suffered from asthma and allergies until his father, a trumpet player, took him along to a Scientologist and he was cured. The family embraced Scientology and moved to Saint Hill in England, where Miscavige, a precocious achiever, became an auditor at the age of 12. He joined the Sea Org – the Church’s priesthood – and became a favourite cameraman and messenger of Mr Hubbard. When the old prophet died in 1986, Miscavige rose to the top, proclaiming to grieving Scientologists that LRH had ‘discarded the body he had used in this lifetime.’

  Intense, clever, Miscavige is known in the Church’s peculiar corporate-speak as Chairman of the Board or COB. He is given to grand claims: ‘If you’ve heard we’re the fastest growing religion on earth - it’s true.’

  To the Church’s apostles, like Cruise and Travolta, Miscavige is a great servant of mankind. Some outsiders might consider that he has proved to be a deft and formidabl
e operator, especially good at exploiting the weaknesses of those who criticise the Church. Ex-members of the Church, some of whom remain Scientologists and some of who no longer have anything to do with Scientology, say their experience of Miscavige was somewhat different, to put it mildly.

  Whatever the truth about its leader, it is a fact that under Miscavige the Church of Scientology has been gaining acquiescence around the world.

  In Germany, forever fearful of repeating the terrible mistakes of history, the Church of Scientology has faced serious, government-backed scrutiny for decades because of fears that it is a totalitarian organisation. The Church has fought back. In 1996 a number of famous Americans wrote an open letter to the then Chancellor, Helmut Kohl. Signatories included Bertram Fields (who just so happens to be Tom Cruise’s lawyer), Goldie Hawn, Dustin Hoffman, Larry King, Mario Puzo, Tina Sinatra, Oliver Stone and the late Gore Vidal. They wrote: ‘In the Germany of the 1930s, Hitler made religious intolerance official government policy. In the 1930s, it was the Jews. Today it is the Scientologists… We implore you to bring an end to this shameful pattern of organized persecution. It is a disgrace to the German nation.’

  In 2008, Tom Cruise starred as the great anti-Nazi German hero, Claus Von Stauffenberg in the film ‘Valkyrie’. That raised the question whether Scientology’s number one parishioner, Cruise, had made a brave film about a German hero. Or whether he had pulled off a great PR coup by taking on the role of a great enemy of totalitarian power, while being a member of what some say is a totalitarian cult – and in so doing subtly undermining one of the Church’s strongest critics.

  In the United States, it is a similar story of official hostility to the Church weakening under attack, then morphing, first into acquiescence with the Church’s assertion that it should be classed as a religion, then actively promulgating that claim to other countries. The Church of Scientology had long been considered a business, not a religion, in the United States. In 1993 that changed when during the Clinton Presidency the Inland Revenue Service reversed its previous position and declared the Church a religion, saving it millions in taxes and giving it a shield against those who would dare criticize it. A week after the great breakthrough, 10,000 Scientologists went to an arena in LA. Chairman of the Board Miscavige took to the stage in black tie and spoke for two-and-a-half hours flanked by two flaming torches. He denounced the Church’s enemies, swayed by a hive-mind of psychiatrists, ‘pea-brained psych-indoctrinated mental midgets’ bent on creating a ‘slave society’, damned the IRS civil servants as ‘vampires’ and warned the Church’s foes: ‘We know who they are and we’ll get to them last.’ Miscavige’s trademark manner of address seems to include common themes of vilification and revenge.